Power and Status 2

When I am waiting at the bus stop for my son, women and men (parents) are often talking about moving to a better neighborhood in Massachusettes so that their sons or daughters can have a better education. That's fine with me. It's upward mobility and the people in Mass are generally much smarter than people in New Hampshire. There's much more wealth in Massachusettes also. So people are trying to find better environments that secure the success of their offspring. It's the Darwinian struggle for survival and finding the best environment that produces the success of one's offspring is one way of thinking about natural selection. Also, finding the appropriate wife/ husband/ or significant other. Also, the better neighborhoods have more political clout so more power to the residents. This is not necessarily so. Postmodernism, the dominant cultural movement of our age, is a philosophical movement that actually empowers artists, literary critics, etc. Reality is seen as a text that needs to be analyzed, corrected, and even edited. Everything is deconstructionist and deconstruction is a citation of reality (Roland Barthes). One may say that there are natural sutures in reality and our reason for being may be much more complex than one thinks. So if the middle class is really dropping all its values and trying to climb to the upperclass, what is the reason for being? Another way of putting this is, is it really possible for a middle class person to climb to the upperclass if class is the only basis for identity? It is actually easier for a workingclass person to climb to the upperclass than a middle class person. Hollywood, Music Industry, Sports are the roads through which a workingclass person can gain great wealth but not necessarily power. Literary critics, writers... on the other hand... may find that they actually have much more power than before simply by analyzing reality and layering the text (dissimulation) and moving it toward the reality that one finds to be better. Reality is not hard bricks and stone... words are also spoken realities, speech acts that can be construed as an absence. So, to get back to the middle-class person who's a product of a very materialistic mode of thinking, that person would literally have to reinvent himself to become upperclass. Now I know that alot of Asians are dying to be upperclass, but it's really not roses and sunshine there. The upperclass have alot of problems in America. There's a strange phenomena that I don't really understand and that is I never understood why WASPS and Asians, as similar as they are, don't really get along. There is the difference of the sexes, there is the emotional dissociation of the men, there is the emphasis on education... but they seem to despise each other. It's true, WASPS have produced some great men of worth and talent, but in the end, we are all ordinary men. But I digress.